S. Samuel
Hip-Hop veteran Q-Tip has updated fans on the status of his upcoming Industry Rules book and gave some details on its subject matter.
While keeping details to a minimum, Tip promised the book was still in the works and would drop sometime next year.
The A Tribe Called Quest frontman talked about Industry Rules, the guidebook he’s working on with writer dream hampton, who also worked with Jay-Z on Decoded. Due out in 2011, Q-Tip said Industry Rules is not a memoir, but a “cautionary tales of the industry. My little stories and each one will have a rule to it. I don’t want to give to much up but it’s gonna be like ‘There’s rules to this sh*t I wrote me a manual,'” he said referring to The Notorious B.I.G.‘s classic song “The Ten Crack Commandments.” (XXL Mag)
Information on the book’s progress hit the Internet last year.
He has signed on the dotted line with Ballantine Books for an unexpected memoir. Titled Industry Rules, Q-Tip is expected to carefully construct his life story that includes growing up in Queens, his rise and fall with A Tribe Called Quest and subsequent solo success thereafter. The book, also in cooperation Random House Publishing Group, which owns Ballatine Books, was sold recently and according to a release is “a creatively constructed telling of his life story”. (Examiner)
Earlier this year, rap veteran Buckshot spoke with SOHH about his collection of industry guidelines, Common Knowledgy of the Entertainment Industry.
“With this book, everything happened as an inspiration. I would get questions from everybody and everywhere we go and I hear people ask these questions, kids all over. People inquiring about how do you [survive in the music industry]. They have their foot in the industry but they’re really not capitalizing. I got inspired to do the book from a lot of different angles but for the most part, I’m over excited because when I grew up, I learned a lot about the business from reading books like this. And [now I can communicate] what I do know about this game.” (SOHH)
Tip’s co-writer dream hampton recently talked to SOHH about the trend of rappers releasing books.
“Even as a writer, I don’t privilege the written word over the [spoken] word. I don’t think that a culture is less valid because it’s primarily oral and I don’t think that all of these hip-hop books validate or make hip-hop more real or more important. Hip-Hop would be just as important as it is without anybody writing a book.” (SOHH)
Check out Q-Tip speaking on his upcoming book down below:
Q-Tip Talks New Book from XXL Video on Vimeo.
